NEW YORK (Jan 4, 2007): Looking for an Atelier Versace tan chiffon evening dress, beaded bustier or catsuit worn by Grammy-winning pop star Whitney Houston? Or maybe an assortment of music awards won by her soon-to-be ex-husband Bobby Brown?
Houston, one of the most celebrated pop artists of the 1980s and '90s, is being forced to sell off clothes, instruments and sound equipment to pay a debt to a warehouse storing the items.

- Reuters
PARIS (Jan 4, 2007): A French court ruled on Tuesday (Jan 2, 2007) that an organisation with far-right links can continue offering pork soup to the homeless, rejecting police complaints that the food distribution was racist.
Police banned the soup kitchen last month, arguing that the handouts discriminated against Jews and Muslims who do not eat pork on religious grounds.
The administrative court said the distribution was "clearly discriminatory," but could not be stopped because the organisers offered to feed anyone who asked for help.

The mayor of Paris condemned the ruling and urged the police to appeal the ruling.
"Faced by this initiative which stinks of xenophobia, I want once again to express city hall's desire to fight all forms of discrimination, racism and anti-Semitism," mayor Bertrand Delanoe said in a statement. - Reuters
HONGKONG: A man who punished his son by forcing him to parade naked twice in public was ordered by a court to live in a shelter and to undergo counselling before returning to the family home.

The 46-year-old father dealt out the punishment first when his 10-year-old son failed to do his homework and then a second time when the boy argued and pushed over his younger brother.
He appeared in court yesterday for sentencing after earlier pleading guilty to ill-treating a child, said the report in the Hong Kong Standard.
The court heard that on the first occasion in October 2005, the father forced his son to march naked through the streets for 10 minutes.

The boy's mother reported the incident to the police.
The father pleaded guilty to child abuse at a hearing in October2006 and was bound over to keep good behaviour for two years.
However, just weeks after his court appearance, he dealt the same punishment again, dragging the naked boy from the bath and forcing him to take an elevator downstairs after a row with his three-year-old brother.

Sentencing him yesterday to 18 months probation, magistrate Kwok Wai-kin told the father that, while his intentions were respectable, his parenting methods were wrong and amounted to "mental abuse".
"Your behaviour is completely unacceptable," said Kwok, "You haveseverely humiliated your son". - dpa
SYDNEY (Jan 4, 2007): The only video of "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin being stabbed by a stingray and killed has been handed to his wife Terri to ensure it is never made public, Australian authorities said today.

The coroner in Australia's tropical Queensland state, who is examining Irwin's death last September, said police had released the death footage to Terri Irwin just before Christmas. - Reuters
Female Beefeater: Towering milestone for women?
LONDON (Jan 4, 2007): The guardians of Britain's historic Tower of London are enlisting girl power for the first time in their 522-year history.

The Tower's Yeoman Warders, commonly known as Beefeaters - whose ceremonial dress is a distinctive scarlet and gold tunic, white ruff, red stockings and black patent shoes - have appointed the first female member to their ranks.
"There were six candidates - five were male and she was the only female," spokesman Natasha Woollard said. "She was the best candidate for the job.

"
Woollard said the woman, whose name has not yet been made public, was serving in the armed forces and "will join her new colleagues in the Yeoman Body at the Tower of London in summer 2007."
The new Beefeater's full job title will be "Yeoman Warder of Her Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, and Members of the Sovereign's Body Guard of the Yeoman Guard Extraordinary." - Reuters
From yap to growl, device dogs intruders
BEERSHEBA, Israel (Jan 4, 2007): An Israeli firm has designed a security system to ensure jailbreakers or intruders find a guard dog's bark can indeed be worse than its bite.

Harnessing technology that interprets barking - to see if an animal is responding to a threat instead of just routinely woofing - the company aims to replace or supplement expensive electronic surveillance systems.
"There is currently very little utilisation of the watchdog's early warning capabilities," says privately owned manufacturer Bio-Sense Technologies, based in the Israeli town of Petah Tikva, on its Web site.
The company - which says dogs have better night vision than humans and a vastly superior sense of smell and hearing - used computers to analyse 350 barks and found dogs of all breeds and sizes barked the same alarm when they sensed a threat.

If the dogs sense an intruder or attempted security breach, dozens of sensors around the facility pick up their "alarm bark" and alert the human operators in the control room. - Reuters
LOS ANGELES (Jan 4, 2007): Former Playboy Playmate and oil heiress Anna Nicole Smith has been ordered to have her baby undergo a paternity test by Jan 23 as part of a lawsuit by an ex-boyfriend, his attorney said.
Larry Birkhead sued Smith in October, demanding she have the paternity test because he believed he was the father of a baby girl she gave birth to in the Bahamas on Sept 7.

- Reuters
Will Ferrell, wife welcome new baby boy
LOS ANGELES (Jan 4, 2007): Comic actor Will Ferrell, whose hit movies include "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby", and his wife have had their second baby boy, Ferrell's representative said on Tuesday (Jan 2, 2007).
Mattias Ferrell was born in the early hours on Saturday (Dec 30, 2006) in Los Angeles, according to a statement from his publicist Matt Labov. - Reuters
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Jan 4, 2007): Haitian President Rene Preval has appointed Haitian-born hip-hop star Wyclef Jean as a roving ambassador to promote the troubled country's image abroad, government officials said yesterday.

"We wish we could have several Wyclefs as roving ambassadors because the country could have gained so much," Foreign Affairs Minister Renald Clerisme told Reuters in an interview. - Reuters
LOS ANGELES (Jan 4, 2007): Their May-December romance has lasted longer than many a Hollywood marriage, and now actress Demi Moore, 44, tells Vanity Fair magazine that she and husband Ashton Kutcher, 28, are considering having kids.
"Most definitely," she told the widely-read magazine in its February issue that hit newsstands in New York and Los Angeles on Tuesday.

(Jan 2, 2007)- Reuters
HENLEY-ON-KLIP, South Africa (Jan 4, 2007): American talk show host Oprah Winfrey on Tuesday (Jan 2, 2007) opened a $40 million school for disadvantaged South African girls which she has paid for out of her own pocket.
The sleekly designed campus, sprawling 52 acres in a sleepy community south of Johannesburg, encompasses classrooms and laboratories equipped with flat screen computers, a yoga studio, beauty salon and well-stocked library.